Kids in Korea just say yes to smartphones

Korea's kids and teens are overdependent on their smartphones and the Covid-19 pandemic only made things worse.

According to the 2022 Statistics on the Youth report released by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and the National Youth Policy Institute on Wednesday, 37 percent of people between the ages of 10 and 19 were at risk of smartphone overdependence in 2021, an increase of 1.2 percentage points over the previous year.

While the rate remained around 30 percent until 2019, it soared to 35.8 percent in 2020, after the beginning of the pandemic.

By gender, overdependent girls (37.1 percent) were only slightly higher than boys (37 percent). By age, middle school students were most dependent on smartphones ― 41 percent of the total ― followed by high school students (36.4 percent) and elementary school students (31.6 percent).

Overdependent people between the ages of 10 to 19 used their smartphones to watch videos, play games and send messages.

As of 2020, 33.8 percent of students from Grades 4 to 6 said they had watched pornography, lower than high school students (45.1 percent), but higher than middle school students (32.2 percent).

The report showed that suicide was the highest cause of death among people aged nine to 24. Suicide has been the leading cause of death among young people in Korea for a decade.

In 2020, the death toll among people between the ages of 9 to 24 was 1,909, down 2.3 percent year-on-year. The causes of death included suicide (957 cases), safety-related accidents (316 cases), and cancer (210 cases).

In 2021, 38.8 percent of middle and high school students responded they felt stressed in their lives, while 26.8 percent said they experienced depression in the past year.

BY SEO JI-EUN [seo.jieun1@joongang.co.kr]